Lizst

It's the 200th birthday of Romantic composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt (1811). He was born in Raiding, Hungary, and was composing by the age of eight. By the time he was 16, he was exhausted from studying and touring all over Europe, and he expressed a desire to become a priest. He earned his living as a piano teacher after his father died, and when he was 17, he fell in love with one of his pupils. Her father insisted she end the romance, at which point Liszt became so ill that his obituary appeared in a Paris newspaper. He gave up on the idea of the priesthood, but later in life spent many years composing religious music inspired by his interest in Gregorian plainsong; the religious establishment didn't approve of it, and so it wasn't published until many years after his death. In the 1860s, following the death of two of his children, he eventually joined a monastery outside Rome. Though he received the four minor orders of porter, acolyte, exorcist, and lector, he never became a priest.
In many ways, Liszt was ahead of his time, and not just musically. He gained a reputation as a humanitarian, and at the height of his popularity he would give concerts specifically to earn money for disaster relief. By the late 1850s, he was so wealthy that he gave all of his concert fees to charity. Liszt was also charismatic, and his onstage presence inspired what may have been the first example of widespread fan frenzy. It began in Berlin in 1842 and came to be known as "Lisztomania." His admirers would follow him around, snatching up his discarded cigar butts, coffee dregs, and broken piano strings. They fought over his handkerchiefs and gloves, and would scream and faint at his performances. Rather than being considered a harmless and amusing fad, Lisztomania was viewed as a serious, and contagious, medical condition.